Skills: The game has a huge list of skills that are leveled via use. Everything from cooking and house building to one-handed weapons, two-handed weapons, shield use etc. Think similar to Elder Scrolls system in terms of progressing skills. As time goes on, to help newer players catch up, earlier levels of the skill will level faster. This is to prevent an eve-type thing where new players are at such a disadvantage that it's nearly impossible to catch up. Without setting anything in stone, it'd be something like "When a player reaches 101 skill rating, level 1-2 goes 10% faster. When a Player reaches 102 skill rating, level 2-3 goes 10% faster." Etc. Don't say no purely on the numbers - it's guesstimates.

Not great to not be able to max out a character. Some people will always have an advantage under this scenario. I'd advise having a max total amount of skill that is shared between all the skills available but otherwise complete customization.

Small servers Each server can only host 2500(500? 1500? 5000? Not sure) players. Each account may only have 1 character, so no need to worry about alts flooding the system. If a player does not log on for 1 month, he is removed from the server and put in to a floating pool where he may go to a new server, allowing newer players to enter the server.

As long as you avoid ghost servers, smaller is better.

No level system. You can't inspect other players skills. You can inspect their items/non-combat-strength-based achievements etc. Each player stands on his own legs and the reputation he builds within his server. Remember when WoW first came out and you saw that warrior in full tier 1 on an epic ground mount? Yeah.

A completely non-instanced world. While player houses and such can be deemed off-limits to other players, they are still within the main world. All dungeons are non-instanced.

To compliment #4, random events and dungeons can be generated within the world. One day, you're walking down a road that yesterday nothing was going on. Now, there's a war band of lizardmen marching down it, or a group of bandits with a boss mob ambushing you. A previously undiscovered cave has opened up for exploration. Think Diablo-style (not D3, but like d1/d2) dungeons generated.

COMBAT:

Magic: Spells can be bound together to create interesting effects. Use a waterfall spell to get your opponent wet and then hurl lightning at him to electrocute him or use a frost spell to freeze him solid. Put the target to sleep and use a nightmare spell that can damage him while he's cc'd and you focus on other monsters. Hurl two spears at two separate opponents then cast a chain spell to link them together. If they break the chain, the spear is pulled out causing extra damage. Any number of combinations you can think of.

Cool.

A thought is to have elements only as basic spells. Fire, for example. Then, combine fire with an orb modifier to create a fireball while earth would be a big stone fist. Combine water with a flow modifier to create a waterfall while fire with a flow modifier would be a slow moving torrent of fire. A lance modifier would create spear-like abilities, a rain modifier would make it an aoe thing from the sky or an earthquake, a trap modifier would make it a trap etc.

Non-magic: Physical combat has no auto attack. Instead, your abilities change based on the weapons that you're using. Dual wielding has its own combos that are vastly different than 1h/shield that are vastly different from 2h, with each subtype weapon available in the game using different combos. A mace can smash in enemies armor, reducing its effectiveness until repaired. A sword can weaken an opponent, making them slower as their blood gushes from their body. Polearms and spears have longer range and can be wielded like quarterstaffs for great defense and offense. There are no ranged weapons.

Cool.

Support skills exist that can do minor heals and buffs and can do things like helping chain combos with their friends. However, no dedicated healing class exists. You are responsible for your own survival, through potions, items, or abilities.

Could work but needs development so people have to work together. The holy trinity thing is there to force people to work in a group. Besides having more people why would people work together in this mechanic setting?

Raids exist but share tags with all players, even those not in a raid group. However, for each player in combat with the boss, he scales accordingly. Bosses will have to be designed with the idea that there could be 10 people attacking them or 1000 attacking them. This would mostly be done with dynamic spawning of adds, high-damage aoe abilities that are avoidable (think Will's devastating combo), and other similar things. Raid leaders for their respective raids can set loot measures - if they want to get a huge loot list and assign them or have those pieces randomly distributed to the raid. If you are a small group or solo player who tagged along, it'd go LFR style-loot (except a much higher chance, due to the epicness of it).

How is loot handled when 1,000 people attack something? Do you want 999 people pissed when someone gets a piece of gear?

COMMUNITY:

A living, breathing world community will exist via player houses, guild territories, etc. Players can choose to clear entire fields or forests and create their own town. Elected mayors or governors can set weekly tax rates for gold that will be set in to server-held storage for further development of the city. Guilds can build massive castles that can then spawn monster attacks that siege the walls or dragons that fly in from above.

Players can be purely craftsman based - have hunter friends bring in materials from bosses in dungeons or raids and create weapons or go get them yourself if you want to mix it up. Become the one guy on the server that can do a specific design of pillar that a guild wants for its guild leader's mansion. Be the master weaponcrafter that can charge incredible fees for the items you make. Be the cook that everyone comes to because your items provide the best regeneration or buffs.

All cool.

PVP

There would of course be PvE servers with only dueling, but PvP servers would allow full-scale PvP outside of the safe city zones.

What you gain from pvping: all of your opponents potions and other consumables such as teleport crystals below x gold cost. If the tag is split on the target, the items are split evenly. You loot 5% of the gold the target is carrying at the time. You gain skill rating from attacking your opponent but you may only gain so much skill on a single target per 72 hour period to prevent farming. In addition, for each unique person you kill in a 72 hour period, you may gain gold or have a rare chance at an item.

Neutral: If you are a major pvper, your name turns red and you have a slight red glow around your body to warn players you are not to be trifled with.

What you lose from dying in pvp: you lose all consumables. You are sent to closest town, player-built or not, that is friendly to you. Your items take a durability loss. You lose 5% of the gold you were carrying at the time.

You live in a fantasy world if you dont think there would be more then enough guilds that are made of people who like to do exactly that.

If those guilds exist, then that makes for great competition between the guilds who do it what you seem to think the 'right' way and those who leech, no? Keep in mind that servers have a limited number of players. If the entire server is made up of those who just hit a boss once then the bosses won't ever go down.

---------- Post added 2012-11-14 at 07:48 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Angella

Not great to not be able to max out a character. Some people will always have an advantage under this scenario. I'd advise having a max total amount of skill that is shared between all the skills available but otherwise complete customization.

Do you mean that each skill has a cap or that you can only gain so many skill points? For example, 1h ability capping at 1000, 2h ability capping at 1000, etc. and you can max those and every other skill. Or do you mean that you can only level all skills for a total of 10,000 times?

As long as you avoid ghost servers, smaller is better.

That is the goal.

Could work but needs development so people have to work together. The holy trinity thing is there to force people to work in a group. Besides having more people why would people work together in this mechanic setting?

This is an excellent question and one of the reasons I'm gathering feedback. The idea is that more people = faster kills. You clear a dungeon quicker with a friend than solo. Do you not think that efficiency is enough to do this, along with the "having fun playing with other people" aspect of games?

---------- Post added 2012-11-14 at 07:56 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Detheavn

On a website, where your content is more dynamic, something like this may work, but if that would be the text on the back of a DVD case in a store, I'd put it down and label it as uninteresting. Since that's basically all you gave us here, I can understand why people are not that enthousiastic about the 'story'

Yep, I know! I wish I was able to provide more information. Unfortunately, brainstorming is just that and I don't like tossing out information that can chance on a day by day basis.

Just because of no level system. It could be a perfect MMO but without that, I wouldnt play it for more than a month. No level system and catch up systems are deal breakers for me. Ideally designed MMO would never make anything easier unless it's a balance issue that's being fixed. Instead they should just provide content for every level player or make most things have fairly low requirements but being above them would decrease the number of players needed for it and the time needed to complete it.

Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot...

If those guilds exist, then that makes for great competition between the guilds who do it what you seem to think the 'right' way and those who leech, no? Keep in mind that servers have a limited number of players. If the entire server is made up of those who just hit a boss once then the bosses won't ever go down.[COLOR="red"]

No because the leechers could just stand there and let others do the work...just think of Sha on a bigger scale.

I personally have read the Sword Art Online light novels but I am curious how you draw similarities between what I posted and SAO?

Almost everything draws some kind of similarity between SAO and your design but what stood-out are:
1. The community part about "A living, breathing world community" which is very similar to what SAO appeared to be. Almost everything is controlled by players. In addition, in SAO players choose combat or non-combat (crafting, gathering, baking etc...) roles similar to your "be anything you want".

2. The part about if you pvp a lot your indicator turns red.

3. The death penalty is similar to the new part in SAO where they're not trapped in there.

4. The way skills levelled although most famously used in TES series is also used in SAO.

5. The way you described everything screamed SAO at me for some reason.

Your raid model sounds like an absolute trainwreck. What reason is there to be a raid leader (or even have people flagged as such) when you cannot possibly hope to organize everyone effectively? At best you're going to have an environment that favors zerg tactics with a little bit of having to dodge stuff every now and again. You can't tune an interesting encounter that accounts for anywhere between ten and a thousand players.
Why can't you organize things effectively? Why is it not possible to make an announcement than on November 30th, 2012, at 7pm, the Guild PuppetShowJustice is going to be raiding Archavon the Stone Giant and that if you would like to come along, please send its guild leader an in game message. Then, organize your raid. Hundreds of people can use in-game (or out of game) voice chat with the raid leader leading. Explain the strategy you are going to use and then execute it.

Large-scale raids have been done before, where a few people lead hundreds.
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The problem i see with this, are the trolls. Or those who only would like to kill a boss using XXX amount of people rather than the expected amount, just for bragging rights. I don't believe a throng of players would be happy having to sit and wait, and vice versa i don't think the smaller group would be too happy if a giant group just jumped in and started killing the boss they are trying to kill in a more challenging manner.

I guess with Dynamic scaling it wouldn't matter, you could 5 man or 1,000 man, and the boss would feel exactly the same.

I gotta say though, an MMO focused much more on the community would be far better than what we currently have. I played WoW from Vanilla to Cata. The biggest issue i had was watching my server go from amazing people, to the dredges of society. Are you considering any sorta of infraction system, or punishment system that truly makes people think twice about ruining the flow of the server, or the other players experience?

Take any MMO design philosophy out there, sprinkle in some nice graphics and smooth gameplay, and you will capture an audience. It's no coincidence that in the past decade MMOs (both A+ titles and smaller almost unheard of ones) pop up just about every few months.

I like some of your designs OP, specially the no levels and leveling up skills insteads. I loved that part in FFXI. But what makes an MMO truly successful these days seems to depends on how broad an audience you can go. And how many features you can put in there that will not alienate a part of your potential player base. WoW for instance has sooooo many features we all love, but it's quickly overshadowed by dailies that "feels" manadatory. Again, just 1 feature. Or even just that 1 boss your guild can't kill will cause people to quit, leave, etc etc.

-With no alts allowed, you killed alt-a-holics interest. FFXI seemed to have no inherit reason to make alts for instance, except for crafting limitations and maybe racials. But I still found myself making different races, different looks, and different names all on the same server so that I could continue to play with friends.

-With lack of instancing, you killed the game for those who have lag issues in any kind of decent looking game (my fps drops on sha for instance even on medium settings). I would dread seeing the server "community" come together for a world boss, and would try to monopolize the spawns with around 10-20 guildies who I know could perform. Remember your bosses scale down to that level. Why have 1000 people who may or may not do their job, when you can have 10 that you know will.

-All the players who dream of being archers in MMOs also have no place now. If you can have ranged casters why could you not have archers?

-Players who have may or may not take breaks because of RL stuff will find it harder coming back, even with a faster way to catch skills up. The only reason I've played WoW as much as I have is because when I come back, everyone is on equal footing again. Games like Eve and FFXI it was almost impossible to enjoy the game again after a long break. My friends were miles ahead of me and I couldn't see a quick way to catch up.

Thats just a few of my complaints, but you get the idea. Even with all this though, there is nothing stopping your MMO from reaching 50,000+ players.

Just because of no level system. It could be a perfect MMO but without that, I wouldnt play it for more than a month. No level system and catch up systems are deal breakers for me. Ideally designed MMO would never make anything easier unless it's a balance issue that's being fixed. Instead they should just provide content for every level player or make most things have fairly low requirements but being above them would decrease the number of players needed for it and the time needed to complete it.

There will always be content for lower tiers. However, being able to play with friends is rather important, no? Or perhaps your friends need a new sword and board person and you're interested in doing it. There are many reasons to have a catch up system.

Why is no level system such a deal breaker?

---------- Post added 2012-11-14 at 07:39 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Sarac

No because the leechers could just stand there and let others do the work...just think of Sha on a bigger scale.

These type of leechers would be come pariahs, assuming that we designed bosses where it's possible to attack a boss then run far enough way to keep a tag and not be within its attack ranges.

These type of people would be banned from towns, guild areas, etc. Players wouldn't trade with them. Players wouldn't buy or sell items to them. The community would deal with these kind of people.

---------- Post added 2012-11-14 at 07:40 PM ----------

Originally Posted by N-7

Almost everything draws some kind of similarity between SAO and your design but what stood-out are:
1. The community part about "A living, breathing world community" which is very similar to what SAO appeared to be. Almost everything is controlled by players. In addition, in SAO players choose combat or non-combat (crafting, gathering, baking etc...) roles similar to your "be anything you want".

2. The part about if you pvp a lot your indicator turns red.

3. The death penalty is similar to the new part in SAO where they're not trapped in there.

4. The way skills levelled although most famously used in TES series is also used in SAO.

5. The way you described everything screamed SAO at me for some reason.

Okay, thanks I was just curious. I will point out the first one was first attempted by Vanguard: Saga of Heroes but was poorly designed and implemented so players ended up hunting anyway.

These type of leechers would be come pariahs, assuming that we designed bosses where it's possible to attack a boss then run far enough way to keep a tag and not be within its attack ranges.

These type of people would be banned from towns, guild areas, etc. Players wouldn't trade with them. Players wouldn't buy or sell items to them. The community would deal with these kind of people.[COLOR="red"]

Are these punishments assumed? or enforced?

What i mean is, are you assuming the players will ban trolls from town/guild areas and no trade buy or sell with them? Or would there be GM's who would enforce these things by disabling their ability to perform these actions? Assuming faith in a community could be dangerous, normally a community needs to be developed first before you see how it will behave.

What i mean is, are you assuming the players will ban trolls from town/guild areas and no trade buy or sell with them? Or would there be GM's who would enforce these things by disabling their ability to perform these actions? Assuming faith in a community could be dangerous, normally a community needs to be developed first before you see how it will behave.

It's assumed

If a community is willing to feed its bad players, that's completely its choice. However, they have the options to ostracize those players. It's just fine that a group of players who are willing to attempt to take it the easy way and become a guild of pariahs band together, build their own town, and focus on being a group of, essentially, player villains. It sets up great conflict between the "good" guilds and players, and these players. That's what being a living, breathing community is all about.

If a community is willing to feed its bad players, that's completely its choice. However, they have the options to ostracize those players. It's just fine that a group of players who are willing to attempt to take it the easy way and become a guild of pariahs band together, build their own town, and focus on being a group of, essentially, player villains. It sets up great conflict between the "good" guilds and players, and these players. That's what being a living, breathing community is all about.

So if a group of greifers decided to band together make a huge town and work together to destroy a server and ruin the game for, say 800 people, this would be allowed?

I guess in the end you could go inactive for a month and then transfer to another server. But if you invested a ton of time into a server and community only to have a group of really well organized trolls ruin it, it would make for some very unhappy people.

So if a group of greifers decided to band together make a huge town and work together to destroy a server and ruin the game for, say 800 people, this would be allowed?

I guess in the end you could go inactive for a month and then transfer to another server. But if you invested a ton of time into a server and community only to have a group of really well organized trolls ruin it, it would make for some very unhappy people.

What are your thoughts on such a situation?

If the 800 people couldn't band together to stop a much smaller group, then that's fine. Although, I'm not really sure how one can "destroy a server" :P

edit: And it's way too early to start talking about server transfers and such, as a side note.

---------- Post added 2012-11-14 at 10:11 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Lefrog

Take any MMO design philosophy out there, sprinkle in some nice graphics and smooth gameplay, and you will capture an audience. It's no coincidence that in the past decade MMOs (both A+ titles and smaller almost unheard of ones) pop up just about every few months.

I like some of your designs OP, specially the no levels and leveling up skills insteads. I loved that part in FFXI. But what makes an MMO truly successful these days seems to depends on how broad an audience you can go. And how many features you can put in there that will not alienate a part of your potential player base. WoW for instance has sooooo many features we all love, but it's quickly overshadowed by dailies that "feels" manadatory. Again, just 1 feature. Or even just that 1 boss your guild can't kill will cause people to quit, leave, etc etc.

Successful is such an odd word. Is it successful when you reach 100,000 subs? 500k? 10 mil? Is it successful when it gets rave reviews or when you get a bunch of beta testers? Is it successful when you start making enough money to justify more patches for it?

-With no alts allowed, you killed alt-a-holics interest. FFXI seemed to have no inherit reason to make alts for instance, except for crafting limitations and maybe racials. But I still found myself making different races, different looks, and different names all on the same server so that I could continue to play with friends.

-With lack of instancing, you killed the game for those who have lag issues in any kind of decent looking game (my fps drops on sha for instance even on medium settings). I would dread seeing the server "community" come together for a world boss, and would try to monopolize the spawns with around 10-20 guildies who I know could perform. Remember your bosses scale down to that level. Why have 1000 people who may or may not do their job, when you can have 10 that you know will.

-All the players who dream of being archers in MMOs also have no place now. If you can have ranged casters why could you not have archers?

-Players who have may or may not take breaks because of RL stuff will find it harder coming back, even with a faster way to catch skills up. The only reason I've played WoW as much as I have is because when I come back, everyone is on equal footing again. Games like Eve and FFXI it was almost impossible to enjoy the game again after a long break. My friends were miles ahead of me and I couldn't see a quick way to catch up.

Thats just a few of my complaints, but you get the idea. Even with all this though, there is nothing stopping your MMO from reaching 50,000+ players.

These are all good points except for the last one. A higher level friend can play with a level 1. Just throw on a different weapon type, play around with magic, etc. and you're set to go.

There will always be content for lower tiers. However, being able to play with friends is rather important, no? Or perhaps your friends need a new sword and board person and you're interested in doing it. There are many reasons to have a catch up system.

Why is no level system such a deal breaker?

Catch up system of any kind is bad for so many reasons.

1) It cheapens the achievements
2) It forces you to keep playing to stay relevant
3) It heavily contributes to only the latest content being relevant. Just look at WoW. There are tons low level content, thousands of quests, yet every place is a ghost town. Why do something that doesn't matter at all at level cap?
4) Lower tier content already gets easier due to people getting better at the game, more gear stacking on the market and even because it's just easier to do it with later tier gear.
5) It heavily takes away from player driven world and sandbox - this one is not necessarily bad but personal preference.

So in short, less to do, everything becomes meaningless if you can just wait till it gets handed to you and it forces you to play since taking breaks would mean you have to start all over again from the beginning.

So if you really want to play with someone, boost him/her or start new alts together. A token benefit is not worth ruining the whole game for.

As for leveling system. Thats personal preference. I only play MMO's that are RPG with classical RPG elements and levels are pretty important there. But after re-reading your post, I guess you mean something like Skyrim or Runescape? It's still levels then and of course that wouldn't be a problem. I just don't like action MMO's with only a few RPG elements.

Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot...

[quote]2) It forces you to keep playing to stay relevant/quote]
That sounds like a good thing, not a bad thing :P

3) It heavily contributes to only the latest content being relevant. Just look at WoW. There are tons low level content, thousands of quests, yet every place is a ghost town. Why do something that doesn't matter at all at level cap?

This is bad?

The rest of your points essentially the same thing - "low level content needs to be relevant." I'm not sure how much I agree. As pointed out by others, playing with friends is a huge part of the game. Not allowing those players to catch up with their friends is worse than lower level content being near-empty. Also, keep in mind that with only 1 character per server, the average level of players is going to stay roughly the same. A player who picks up an empty spot on an older server will be very far behind. He will have to work hard to catch up - and 20% less per skill point still means he'll need to spend 80% of the time the original players did.

The rest of your points essentially the same thing - "low level content needs to be relevant." I'm not sure how much I agree. As pointed out by others, playing with friends is a huge part of the game. Not allowing those players to catch up with their friends is worse than lower level content being near-empty. Also, keep in mind that with only 1 character per server, the average level of players is going to stay roughly the same. A player who picks up an empty spot on an older server will be very far behind. He will have to work hard to catch up - and 20% less per skill point still means he'll need to spend 80% of the time the original players did.

It needs to stay relevant because then you could play the whole (usually massive) game, with a big, live world, instead of grinding one stupid dungeon for 3 months till the next update comes. So yes, it is really REALLY bad because killing off all the content other than the 2 latest tiers kills the world. And in an instant, you would get a lobby game where you sign up for games with 5-25 randoms or friends instead of an MMO.

And yes, forcing players to keep playing like that is bad. Instead of punishing (if you take a break for a few months your gear will decline at least one tier..) a game should reward players and make them want to play. For example very high level caps lets say something like D3 paragon levels but with minor benefits etc.

Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot...

I personally have read the Sword Art Online light novels but I am curious how you draw similarities between what I posted and SAO?

The sandbox elements. Plain and simple. Right now these features are both mismanaged and fragmented in various MMOs. There's no single fantasy MMORPG that consolidates them. EVE Online has them, but spaceships are on a different level.

Yeah, I'd play it. I just can't get into current fantasy MMORPGs, because they just aren't sandboxes. Your concepts overallare what I like and am looking for.

Also, a portion of the negativity you're getting is over some little, obnoxious details like the alt thing. If I were you, I wouldn't present such details alongside the fundamental basics. But hey, it's your thread.

Originally Posted by Bovinity Divinity

Then the [MMORPG] genre started attracting more players. These players wanted more of a "game" and less of a "world" [...]